74. Traditional deployment
74.1 Create a deployable war file
The first step in producing a deployable war file is to provide a SpringBootServletInitializer
subclass and override its configure method. This makes use of Spring Framework’s Servlet 3.0
support and allows you to configure your application when it’s launched by the servlet container.
Typically, you update your application’s main class to extend SpringBootServletInitializer:
@SpringBootApplication
public class Application extends SpringBootServletInitializer {
@Override
protected SpringApplicationBuilder configure(SpringApplicationBuilder application) {
return application.sources(Application.class);
}
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
}
}
The next step is to update your build configuration so that your project produces a war file rather than a
jar file. If you’re using Maven and using spring-boot-starter-parent (which configures Maven’s
war plugin for you) all you need to do is modify pom.xml to change the packaging to war:
<packaging>war</packaging>
The final step in the process is to ensure that the embedded servlet container doesn’t interfere with
the servlet container to which the war file will be deployed. To do so, you need to mark the embedded
servlet container dependency as provided.
If you’re using Maven:
<dependencies>
<!-- ... -->
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-tomcat</artifactId>
<scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>
<!-- ... -->
</dependencies>
If you’re using the Spring Boot build tools, marking the embedded servlet container dependency as
provided will produce an executable war file with the provided dependencies packaged in a lib-provided directory. This means that, in addition to being deployable to a servlet container, you can
also run your application using java -jar on the command line.